Issue: Sophos Central Admin – US-West region - Delays with the enforcement of Central policies on managed endpoints.

I am able to log in but my machines are not updating including my laptops.  I am unable to connect user to the their policies. how can we get this updated asap.  I have to agree with another user what has been the issue why the US has been down or taking a hit.

Policy updates are still delayed. Here is the latest:

We are currently experiencing latency in navigation of the UI.  Additionally you may:

- Experience delays in new policy being applied to endpoints taking up to 30 minutes

- Intermittent delay in some status messaging being displayed in the console

The support team is working with the Central team to get information about why these issues are occuring. Once we get that info, we'll share it here and on Twitter

- Why are we paying for a product that barely stays stable for more then a couple days?  All these delays in policy enforcement, errors, lack of communication from Sophos are actually costing my company both time and money.

- How is there not been any official communications to customers through account managers or even an official email? (Twitter does not count.) 

- Of the communications we have received, why don't any of them mention that DLP logs not transferring from the local agent to the central console is also a issue. (confirmed by your Sophos support staff). 

Now I've in this morning and my console is filled out "computer of date" errors. 

Hi Lance. All valid questions and we're doing our best to get those answers and more to you. As soon as that information is available we'll share. The Twitter comment was just that we'll post when that information is available and link it from Twitter as well.

It was also a plug for people to follow our Sophos Support Twitter account 

I've begun the process of evaluating alternatives. There was a time I was pretty gung-ho about Sophos and put them in place in my previous and current job. However, when I'm paying for a product that doesn't work it's simply time to move on. I've even had to warn my college buddy about Sophos' performance after he was considering it for his company. Not anymore ...

Honestly cant blame you. 

Just before all these issues started, we were trialing moving our server fleet from current vendor to Sophos Central, but I cannot see how that is possible now. Not being able to push policy my endpoints is generally manageable, just very frustrating.  Not being able to do it on my servers...

Fairly certain I will be asked to make a recommendation on moving our parent company over to Central soon, which is 6000+ endpoints. Can I make that recommendation now? No. That would be a nightmare in the current circumstances. Lucky we are much smaller.

Please stop using Twitter. Telling us "it's back" is not why we pay for a product that should have enterprise grade support.

Your status page has the capability to email and SMS out changes in any of the status checks. I would general assume that a pay product would proved updates in this fashion on not a social platform.

It would also be nice to provide a regular update, and notate when the next update will occurred. Even if the update is no change, knowing that a status update will occurred on a regular schedule provided some level of confidence in your outage procedures.

Any updates on this?

Cannot login and stay logged into Central/Partner...once logged in, one time it will work, the next time it just spins or triggers a server 500 error.

Couldn't agree more Dan, "twitter" this.

Twitter is just one form of communication. 

The Central team is working on a more proactive communications channel through the Central platform. Today, Central Status page has the latest info.

Sure Win said:

Twitter is just one form of communication. 

The Central team is working on a more proactive communications channel through the Central platform. Today, Central Status page has the latest info.

 

Sure Win said:

Twitter is just one form of communication. 

The Central team is working on a more proactive communications channel through the Central platform. Today, Central Status page has the latest info.

 

I can't agree more with you Christopher. The bottom line is that this is a business. When I have my higher-ups come to us with questions, we aren't being effectively equipped to answer them from Sophos. Which makes us as IT professionals look bad, which is then affecting Sophos' reputation.

The slow policy pushing has been affecting us from July 3rd, 2017... This issue has been going on for 5 weeks for me, and I now have old problems that are snowballing into bigger ones because the console will inexplicably be down. The fix (From Sophos) is to reinstall Sophos yet I currently I sit with 20 machines totally unprotected because the I can't install due to console issues. Also you say in many of the status updates on the console that machines are still protected and this is no security risk. Not being able to effectively manage our computers is a security risk. For example, I was caught in the middle of an uninstall for Sophos on a high level branch manager's machine when bitlocker kicked off. Since we utilize Sophos to manage our bitlocker keys I was stuck until your systems come back online... This is unacceptable in a business and is causes me to not be able to rely on and trust Sophos.

Central status is good for perhaps a quick note saying that services are down. But when we purchased Sophos, we did so based on their amazing support and reputation. The support is lacking, but to be fair it is getting better. Part of support however is effective communication.  I don't think it's too much to ask for a full technical follow-up email detailing the who, what, where and why questions, as well as what you're doing to prevent the issue from happening again. Something that we can present as an explaination to managers, directors and C level management.

Also, why does the status page and twitter say two different things currently? (Status page notes that the console is back up and running and twitter says your still working to restore service for US-West clients 4 hours ago.)

Christopher Curwood said:

 

Sure Win

Twitter is just one form of communication. 

The Central team is working on a more proactive communications channel through the Central platform. Today, Central Status page has the latest info.

 

 

 

 

Sure Win,

 

I think I speak for many of your customers here when I say we don't just want to see the basic "Outage affecting X started at Y-time/Outage was resolved at Y-time" information, but we want a proper, full, articulate response from senior management on what is happening to the Sophos Central USA platform that is causing these literal weeks of outages. An email from management, sent to us directly and via our account reps, as well as posted online (not Twitter haha). And it should include why only the USA service is affected and not Germany or Ireland.

 

Thanks Trevor Karppi I didn't get a chance to update the twitter post. Still a very generic message for now

Christopher Curwood I'm definitely working with the Central team to get that message to you everyone here on the community. I'm doing my best to be your voice and champion for these Central issues and how we communicate updates/issues to customers like yourself. Keep the comments coming because my colleagues do see these posts.

I agree with Trevor 100%.  From an enterprise level and the type of company we are we cannot afford to let any PHI slip because Sophos Central is having issues.  proper communication is key.  Currently Management is looking back at Palo Alto Traps since Sophos Central cannot seem to fix the issue happening this is not good because now it shows that I made a bad choice in selecting Sophos.  Sophos central is a great product but you have to communicate better and resolve the issues quicker.

Trevor, I couldn't agree more.

I've had the same experience and I don't think Sophos understands how costly this is to it's customers.

I've lost countless hours of productivity due to these unacknowledged outages and generic failed installation errors.

I've driven three hours to a remote office to do after hours upgrades from in-house Sophos to the cloud and couldn't get it done due to the service being down.

Spent many trying to deploy new machines and troubleshooting installation by renaming machines, removing from the domain, reimaging, adding back to the domain.

Thought maybe it's my firewall so more time changing firewall rules, trying different ISP, different firewall etc.

Also seems like these issues/updates are being worked 9-5 and not 24/7 when many of us are trying to deploy.

Almost feels like it's all outsourced and Sophos is the middle man with no control over the outages.